It’s not marrying somebody. It’s not having kids. It’s being where, if something goes wrong, there’s nothing left of you. It’s where if she goes away, you start functioning like a droid with a restraining bolt installed. Mom wouldn’t want you to be this way. So why are you?”
“I can’t help it.” Luke was on his feet and the words wrenched out of him before he realized it. He rocked, unbalanced by the sudden violence of his emotions.
Ben spun to stare at him. “You’ve got to!”
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re the Jedi Master, you figure it out.”
Luke felt real anger stir within him, a fire fanned by the insolence of Ben’s tone.
No, that was another lie, Luke lying to himself. The fire was being fanned by the fact that Ben was right.
Luke closed his eyes, feeling his way through the insulation of peacefulness he’d constructed for himself across these past months. Beyond it, he tried to find himself. But at first he could feel nothing but the weight of his grief, and the one thing that kept him functioning while carrying that burden-his desire to be reunited with Mara. Reunited when the time came. Reunited in the Force.
Then there was the other weight, the one he had largely slipped from his shoulders, the weight of his responsibility-to the Order, to his family, to the galaxy.
To the living.
Of course he had shrugged it off. No man could carry two such weights for any length of time. He would be crushed beneath them.
But he had to carry the one he had set aside, didn’t he?
I’m sorry, Mara. Knowing it to be a betrayal, Luke slowly, carefully stepped out from under his grief.
It didn’t leave him entirely-just as Mara was still part of him, the pain of losing her would always be with him, too.
But suddenly it was easier to breathe, to think. He wondered how long it had been since he had truly thought clearly.
And curiously, it didn’t feel like a betrayal at all. Then there was that other weight, the weight of duty. He had carried it throughout his adult life, and at times it had ground him down. But at other times it had sustained him, helped keep him alive.
Perhaps that was why he had been so willing to abandon it: it had been keeping him alive at a time when he did not want to live.
With meticulous care, he picked up and shouldered that other weight.
He opened his eyes. His son stood before him, anxious, but now Ben sighed, a brief exhalation of relief. “Hey, Dad, look in a mirror.”
“I don’t need to.”
“You know what? Your feelings betray you.” Luke suppressed a snort. “Ben, if you ever, ever say I told you so…”
“I won’t.”
“…I’ll put you through a training session that would make Kyp Durron cry.”
“I won’t, I won’t.”
“How did you get so smart, anyway? When I wasn’t looking?”
Ben shrugged, once again an adolescent at a loss for words.
Luke put an arm around his son’s shoulders and led him toward the lift. “You know, these are unsettled times. Things are too busy for many of our usual formalities. For ceremonies, for rites.”
Ben frowned, suspicious. “What are you getting at?”
“I think you should begin building your lightsaber.”
Ben skidded to a stop and looked at Luke. “But… . but I haven’t faced my trials.”
“What do you call pulling yourself back from the brink that Jacen pushed you to … and then pulling the Grand Master back from his own brink?”
“Being obstinate.”
“Show me a Jedi Knight who isn’t obstinate.” Luke stepped onto the lift plate and held his toe over the button inset in the permacrete. “Get to work on your weapon, son.” He pressed the button and let the turbolift carry him down, back to his work, back to his responsibility.
Chapter 29
SANCTUARY MOON OF ENDOR, SHUTTLE REVEILLE, ON APPROACH
The forest stretched for countless kilometers in every direction, but below was a clearing broad enough to house several sports complexes … and at its center was a huge sheet of durasteel, curved like the roof of a prefabricated building, burned through in places by the violence of uncontrolled atmospheric entry, elsewhere rusted in spots the size of whole freighters. Nearly forty years earlier, it had been cast off the second Death Star when that vessel exploded. It had come to ground here, crushing and igniting all life beneath it, creating a clearing where before there had been tall trees. Now, decades later, grasses, flowers, and vines grew around the relic, but trees were slow in returning to the once-burned spot.
Syal Antilles, at the pilot’s controls, banked the shuttle over the site, taking note of objects and living things on the ground-the Millennium Falcon, half protruding from the shadow of the giant metal plate, X-wings, shuttles, Jedi. droids, Ewoks. The Ewoks clambered on the vehicles. climbed the curved slopes of the Death Star remnant. Some had constructed sleds of wood planks and leather, and now they rode the sleds down the smoother, unrusted slopes of the metal plate.